Best Sellers

Our suggestions for those titles to complete your bookshelf

Skira Rizzoli

With the creation of Skira Rizzoli Publishing, two of the world’s most renowned publishers of fine art books have come together to form an imprint focusing on museum publications. Both Skira and Rizzoli are internationally recognized for their diverse range of art, photography, architecture, and design titles, as well as their high standard of content, design, and production. Through superior-quality publications, Skira Rizzoli aims to bring museum exhibition content to a larger audience, promoting excellence in cultural commerce, scholarship, and in the teaching of history and criticism.

Written by Donald Albrecht, Contribution by The Museum Of The City Of NY

The definitive book on the legendary photographer’s life in New York City, with many never-before-seen images and reminiscences by his closest friends and confidants. From the 1930s, when he helped revolutionize fashion journalism, through the 1960s, when he launched headlong into the Pop art era, London-based photographer Cecil Beaton brought to New York City his own perspective–aristocratic, sexually ambiguous, and theatrical. At the same time, New York offered Beaton innumerable opportunities to reinvent himself and his…

The most comprehensive review of a remarkable contemporary artist’s work in an extraordinary package designed by Sagmeister, Inc. Since the early 1990s, New York–based artist Charles LeDray has become known for his miniaturized sculptures of hand-stitched clothing, carved human bone, and thimble-sized ceramics. Their intimate scale and materials poignantly evoke allusions to childhood memory, gender and class stereotypes, and wonder in the everyday. This volume accompanies a mid-career survey exhibition organized by Jen Mergel for the…

Written by James T. Ulak and Howard S. Kaplan, Introduction by Julian Raby

A jewel-like collection of the most exquisite cherry blossoms in Japanese art celebrates the enduring power of spring. Drawn from the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s museums of Asian art, these rare reproductions of gilded screens, woodblock prints, and ink on silk works offer sublimely rendered buds and blooms for all who cherish them. Since the eighteenth century, parties in Japan, from royal maidens to farmers, have gathered to…

Edited by Lisa Phillips and Massimiliano Gioni, Contribution by The New Museum

The work of seminal contemporary artist Chris Burden, insightfully contextualized around major themes, illuminates a practice that is as unique as it is influential. For four decades, Chris Burden’s work has redefined the boundaries of the sculptural field. Whether subjecting himself to extremes of physical suffering or reconfiguring forgotten urban objects and toy models to create potent signifiers of a time and place, the brute force of Burden’s work in the physical realm reverberates through the…

A major survey including new and celebrated works by Turner Prize–winning artist Chris Ofili. Set to accompany the first major museum show in the United States of contemporary British artist Chris Ofili, this richly illustrated volume surveys two decades of artworks that meld figuration, abstraction, and decoration to yield hybrid juxtapositions of high and low culture. Best known for intricately constructed works featuring beadlike dots of paint, elephant dung, and images culled from popular media, Ofili’s…

A visual account of the birth of graffiti and street art, showcasing as-yet-unseen works collected by preeminent artist Martin Wong. Referred to by the New York Times as an artist “whose meticulous visionary realism is among the lasting legacies of New York’s East Village art scene of the 1980s,” Martin Wong (1946–1999) was firmly entrenched in the NYC street art world of the late ’70s and ’80s. City as Canvas chronicles the most important chapter in…

Foreword by Sandra Still Campbell and Diane Still Knox, Contribution by Dean Sobel and David Anfam

The first significant publication on Clyfford Still and his work in more than twenty-five years celebrates one of abstract expressionism’s founders. Best known for his compelling abstract works with jagged fields and powerful expanses of color, Clyfford Still (1904–1980) stands among the giants of post–World War II art. Together with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Barnett Newman, Still helped shape abstract expressionism. This vividly illustrated book presents more than one hundred of Still’s greatest…

A unique photographic presentation of midcentury Modernist mecca Columbus, Indiana, by photographer Thomas R. Schiff. The small town of Columbus, Indiana, only fifty miles south of Indianapolis, has cemented its place as a major architecture and design destination. Ranked by National Geographic as America’s most significant historic place on the strength of its architectural heritage, Columbus contains over fifty buildings by noted modern architects—including I. M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, Robert Venturi, Richard Meier, John Carl Warnecke,…

The first comprehensive survey of Cornelia Foss’s landscapes, still lifes, and portraits, an artist in the style and tradition of Fairfield Porter. ﻿The American artist Cornelia Foss is part of a loosely knit group of artists commonly described as “painterly realists,” many of whom are associated with Long Island’s scenic Hamptons region, including Eric Fischl and Fairfield Porter. This is the first such survey of this artist’s work to be published. Long considered a quintessential Long…

Daniel Lismore is known for elaborate and extravagant ensembles that brilliantly combine haute couture with charity-shop finds, yards of vintage fabrics and tartans, found objects, ribbons, feathers, chain mail, shells, ethnic jewelry, retro accessories, millinery and more in an expression of eccentric, creative energy. A prominent fixture of the London fashion and nightlife circuits, he is both tastemaker and friend to artists ranging…

Inspired by James McNeill Whistler’s famous Peacock Room, contemporary painter Darren Waterston creates his own decadent interpretation in a major installation at MASS MoCA. Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre is a contemporary reimagining of James McNeill Whistler’s decorative masterpiece Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room—originally a dining room in the London mansion of shipping magnate Frederick Leyland. In 1876 and 1877, Whistler transformed the space with painted leather walls, gilded shutters, and a ceiling reflecting…

Written by Eric Shiner, Contribution by Robert Storr, Griselda Pollack, Lisa Liebmann and Brooks Adams

The first comprehensive book accompanying a major touring exhibition by the painter Deborah Kass. More than any artist of the last thirty years, New York City–based painter Deborah Kass has made it her life’s work to position women artists on the great paternal playing field of art history. From her early paintings of the sea pounding rocky shores to her eponymous Warhol Project series and her recent text-based works, Kass has quite literally fired the canon,…

The first book to take a transnational view of destruction in abstract painting of the postwar period. Painting the Void: 1949–1962 focuses on one of the most significant consequences of the rise of gestural abstraction in twentieth-century painting: artists’ literal assault on the picture plane. Responding to the social and political climate of the postwar period—especially the crisis of humanity resulting from the atomic bomb—international artists ripped, cut, burned, or affixed objects to the traditionally…

Written by Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, Preface by Deborah Pope, Contribution by Linda Komaroff, Photographed by Tim Street-Porter

This inspiring book accompanies the first traveling exhibition about Doris Duke’s estate Shangri La and its influential synthesis of modernist architecture and Islamic art and design. Situated on five acres of terraced gardens and pools overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Honolulu’s Diamond Head, Shangri La was the idyllic paradise of philanthropist Doris Duke, reflecting her personal passion for the art, architecture, and design of the Islamic world. The estate incorporates unique architectural features, such as carved…

The first book to celebrate the full breadth of the Starn twins’ innovative photographic career. Defying categorization, Doug and Mike Starn combine traditionally separate disciplines such as science, sculpture, photography, painting, video, and installation. Gravity of Light focuses on the breadth of the Starns’ photographic work, from their critically acclaimed debut in the 1987 Whitney Biennial to their current exploration of light as a requisite for photography and vision and as a symbol of enlightenment. In…